October 6, 2006 Well. I’m chillin’ out and wanting to make something useful. So, I will use this time to educate others on a piece of SEO. I think first we are going to talk about the Meta tags. No no, let’s start a little bit before that. How the search engines «work.» Nobody knows for sure. I would also like to point out the idea of SEO. Search Engine Optimization. There is a very fine line between legit and Too Legit to Quit. Crap….nevermind…that was the 90’s wasn’t it? There is a fine line between legit and shady SEO. The term itself is a little misleading. The search engines are trying ever so diligently to bring relevant results to their customers, and Google is very concerned about making the Internet «better» all around. One of the first things I tell a client is that you should make a concise and well thought out site for your customers, not the search engines. When you start to look like you are doing things solely for the benefit of the search engines, you don’t do as well and may loose a potential customer because your site looks like someone took a poo poo on the screen. So, make a site for your customers, not the search engines, and the search engines will love you for it. «Real SEO» is taking the site made for customers, and modifying it so that it is easier for the search engines to read, and proving it’s relevance and benefit to specific term(s). See the difference? Now let’s discuss Meta tags. (I really hate discussing these because most people leave the conversation at that and assume that there is nothing more. If SEO were a car, Meta tags wouldn’t even be your lighter. There is so much more to it, and many more things that should be a priority. But, we must get through this, so hold my hand, and let’s frolic together, shall we?) Keywords: They don’t matter. No no no…stop talking….they don’t matter. If you want to argue this then make a website, put it on the Internet, and I will make a website of the exact same subject minus keywords, and we will see who wins. I will. You know why? Cus’ keywords don’t matter. Description: This can matter. Some things have been changing lately with regard to description. Google is acting kinda funny so you may hear that they aren’t showing the correct description. Without going into too much detail, we will say that Google is sometimes using the description from DMOZ. If you’re not in DMOZ, they are likely using the text beginning your site. It is important to have some/all of your major search terms in your description. MSN still relies heavily on it and Yahoo! puts a little weight there. Title: Arguably the most important tag. Yahoo! puts the most weight on this tag and the other probably give it the most priority than the other tags. So it’s pretty important that you use you major search terms in your title tag. It’s also important to make sure the words in your title tag are used liberally throughout your text. Making use of bold and header tags is also a good idea for the words in your title. Also, it is commonly said around here that your title should be copied and pasted onto your homepage. This is not so. It is important to use these terms as close to the beginning of your text as possible, and again giving weight to them is a good idea, but some titles just can’t be copied exactly on your content. So, if keywords weren’t important, why would one even list them? I feel it’s a good idea to make a good keyword list and keep the tag just for my train of thought. Search engines still crawl all of your code, and the idea for content is to show a crawler how many times a term is used. For all that is SEO please do NOT repeat terms all over your keywords to try to «trick» the search engine into thinking you make use of a term a lot. They will see this and not like it at all. Again, just use it as your train of thought and keep track of what terms you are concentrating on.

Ok, this does it for Meta tags. We will continue our SEO conversation more as time goes on. And by conversation, I mean I will talk and you will listen. Just kidding. SEO is information and information should be free. Some of you know who I am, and should feel more than comfortable to ask me anything. We all start somewhere, and I will be more than obliged to help in any way. If you don’t know me, please feel free to email me. I think my email is on here somewhere.

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